Great Power contentions

[Montmorency]

Situation in the TO.

Since late January, there have been:

*the first large-scale probes in Zaporizhzhia since last spring
*a renewed reckless frontal assault on Vuhledar (first-wave brigades were wrecked, but more seem to be being assembled) even bigger than the disastrous attacks around the beginning of November
*numerous reports of a culminated Wagner being superseded by VSRF units long held in reserve (Prigozhin has announced that he will no longer be recruiting convicts - but the Ministry of Defense now is instead)
*some of the hardest Russian counterattacks out of Svatove and Kreminna since the front was last mobile in October
*relatively-heavy bombardment in the border areas of Sumy and near Kharkiv City

Two months ago I did predict that late January would be the best time of the winter campaigning season to launch large-scale attacks, but these are just small-scale attacks with greater regularity; I was figuring in the context of a traditional concerted push, because to do otherwise is to squander concentration and weather conditions more favorable for relatively-rapid movement. Instead this looks like a gradual elevation of temperature almost everywhere.

Bakhmut's operational circumstances have continued to deteriorate, after a lull in the second half of January. I had predicted at the beginning of the year the city would fall by the end of February at least, but a retreat within a week (mid-February) is now foreseeable without a more aggressive defense on the part of UFOR. For whatever reason, the fortress-town of Marinka, of which Russia controls at least half by now, is a case study in aggressive Ukrainian mobile defense and commitment of reserves to counterattacks. The city has been brutally-contested since last March, but because it is such a critical defensive node anchoring the entire line from the Dnieper to Avdiivka, UFOR seems to have invested in maintaining control. Something similar might be assessed with regard to Vuhledar. Whereas the story in Northern Donetsk has from the days of the Battle of Popasna last spring been one of UFOR conservation of reserves and maybe artillery coverage until the last minute. The relative reliance on Territorial Defense and National Guard units to hold frontline trenches in static defense has always contributed to higher losses and enemy gains in this sector, and I don't understand why. Targeted battalion-size counterattacks to restore the status-quo from time to time would hardly break the bank of the strategic reserve or limit; Bakhmut for one is also a critical defensive node and anchor, and at this rate a fallback line would have to be about 10 miles east of Slovyansk-Kramatorsk. For example, the loss of the village of Yakovlivka at the beginning of the year obviously allowed the flanking of the truly excellently-situated fortress-town of Soledar, which had withstood frontal assaults for up to 6 months by that time. Predictably, Soledar was immediately flanked and for the past month RuFOR used the breach to expand one of their most significant salients since last spring. All of that could basically have been nipped in the bud with a decisive counterattack to seal the initial, pretty tiny, breach.

Bakhmut will have held out 7 or 8 months, but the relatively-rapid breach of an excellent defensive network (which ultimately compromises the integrity of the whole defensive line of the central fronts) this year under apparent conditions of relative rationing of artillery firepower on the RuFOR side demonstrates continuing serious incapacities on the part of UFOR command, small-unit competence, or individua soldier motivation. Over the past couple weeks GSUA has affirmed several times that its paramount objective is maintaining control of Bakhmut. I'm not sure I've seen many concrete actions to secure that objective, with reinforcements and aggressive defense continuing to be deprioritized before the retention of the strategic reserve (there are some contraindications to this judgement in the past week however), yet announcing that you're going to redouble efforts to hold an area you're actually planning to cede is the kind of public relations stupidity one only really sees from Russia. IIRC even with Severodonetsk-Lysychansk, the government's posture was that it intended to protract the fight for as long as possible, not that it guaranteed full concentration on restoring a stable defense.

If I'm wrong about GSUA, we may finally see the enigmatic "Offensive Guard" shock corps commited to combat or whatever other formations exist in the strategic reserve.

But to return to speculation on the construct of "Russian offensive", while it's possible the Russians do something corny as hell like schedule one discrete offensive push to begin February 24, it's possible that another strategy is taking shape. Namely, they may be deliberately predicating on an upcoming UFOR retreat from Bakhmut as a trigger to expend all accumulated reserves and supplies in a general offensive from Zaporizhzhia to the end of the mutual state border. Basically, this would be an attempt to take advantage of a moment of disorganization to try to replicate most of the initial invasion OPLAN from a year ago, and overwhelm UFOR defensive throughput to the extent that a weak point to exploit opens up somewhere along the broad front. The near-term strategic goals would still be the occupation of Donetsk Oblast and to push UFOR west of the Oskil River.

Such a strategy would not be as favorable for Ukraine as a poorly-resourced attack out of Belarus, but it would still seem to disadvantage RuFOR considerably except in the low-probability, high-risk scenario where UFOR's lines collapse from the pressure or GSUA severely miscalculates in allocating resources between fronts. The only real advantage is the same as with the original, deficient, Russian plan, which had the virtue of creating uncertainty and surprise as to where to granularly prioritize defensive allocation. But both sides are more prepared than they used to be, even as RuFOR is overall weaker, making shock and awe even less viable than it was a year ago by all appearances. The losses to RuFOR in this OPLAN would in all likelihood be so severe as to relegate them to the low-rate attrition characteristic of last autumn for the rest of 2023, and it would ensure that Putin has to commit to a new wave of overt mass mobilization. If this is really the plan, then GSUA would be vindicated in withholding an extensive strategic reserve.

Still, it's another possibility to watch out for. A more traditional concentrated offensive remains my expectation, or at most a two-prong out of Luhansk and Southern Donetsk with a constant fixing component in the center (Avdiivka-Bakhmut axis). Whether this month or delayed until April (I do think GSRU will feel incentivized to act quickly to generate an advantage before NATO-equipped armored formations, and especially GLSDB, can be deployed).



What makes Bakhmut significant - besides being the largest town the two sides have directly contested since last June - is that allowing it to be outflanked as it has, and then captured, allows RuFOR to squeeze out the Siversk-Bilohorivka salient to the north, and to gradually roll up the remaining Ukrainian fortified line from Toretsk to Marinka to the south, which would force a reanchoring of the entire UFOR right wing back to Zaporizhzhia City.

The former is basically fatal to the UFOR effort to advance into Luhansk. The desire to establish mutual support for the flanks of a planned push into Luhansk on both sides of the SD River was strong enough that UFOR undertook a series of counterattacks in July to maintain a presence in Bilohorivka (the easternmost point of control for UFOR on the map), near the site of the destruction of a Russian battalion in May during a fording attempt. At the rate Bakhmut is being flanked, Siversk and everything east of it will have to be abandoned as soon as the end of winter.

The latter, though it would unfold over months, at least through the summer, deprives Ukraine of a whole network of highly-successful fortifications, pushes the defense toward more rural and open areas, subjects the major city of Zaporizhzhia to conventional bombardment, and drives the frontline back from the Sea of Azov in such a way as to dramatically complicate any future southern offensive, while potentially giving Russia space to restore rail logistics between Melitopol and Donetsk.

I've gently pointed out for months that Ukraine does not have unlimited space to cede, and in the context of the advent of mobilization it has obviously failed to attrit RuFOR's total fighting power, even if one optimistically estimates the ratio of irrecoverable RuFOR casualties at 2:1. Attrition has always been a dead-end long-term strategy for Ukraine, as opposed to the development of decisive maneuvers that bite and hold territory that Russia cannot recover. At some point GSUA has to be less conservative with offensive resources, even if it fears they can't be replaced with Western assistance in the future; this keeping the powder dry "until you see the whites of their eyes" business has gotten out of hand.